Talk:Nylon

One could read the entire lead, and much of the article, before discovering that nylon is made from petroleum. There are innumerable sources for this; here's one.^[1] The word oil is mentioned first 2,300 words into the article (but not described as its manufacturing origin), crude oil 4,700 words in, and petroleum is mentioned not once in the entire article. Where nylon comes from, is one of the five-W questions to be answered by any encyclopedic or journalistic article about nylon, which means high up in the lead, probably in the WP:LEADSENTENCE, and prominently in the body of the article. I don't plan to make changes to this article as I'm busy elsewhere, but hopefully some regulars or others here will attend to this. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:11, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

The first sentence says "Nylon is a synthetic polymer", and the linked article on synthetic polymers starts off with "Synthetic polymers are derived from petroleum oil". Seems that none of our other articles on specific thermoplastics mention petroleum in the intro. – Thjarkur (talk) 23:06, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. In the linked article, I have now changed "derived from petroleum oil" to "often derived from petroleum oil", since there are many exceptions. Dirac66 (talk) 01:58, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

The images of N-6 and N-6,6 are difficult to parse and not very useful. I'm a chemist and even though I've worked with both, I had to study the diagrams far longer than if they'd simply been -((CH2-)5-C(=O)-NH-)x and -(C(=O)(CH2)4-C(=O)NH(CH2)6)-NH)-x (or even better with the structural skeleton in 2D rather than on a line. As far as I can see, the only advantage is "oooh! red, blue, white and green|gray balls!" I see no advantage in suggesting that the alternate carbonyl oxygens are "trans" oriented (since they rotate freely). These depictions are useful to who? Nobody, I think. My guess is that they replaced more useful depictions because they were "ball and stick" but actually convey less information, in a sense. There's no use in depicting what is fundamentally a linear polymer in 3D projection. I also note that neither the images nor their caption indicate what the various ball colors signify. Replace these depictions with the corresponding chemical structure (it might also be useful to mention what values the repeat unit typically has; i.e. x = nnn - nnnnn.98.17.180.146 (talk) 09:11, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. Looks like this is a relic from the distant past; see 18:45, 31 January 2006 and File:Nylon6 and Nylon 66.png. Compare de:Polyamide#Nylon, which instead uses File:PA6vsPA66.svg. I'll switch the English-language image over to File:Nylon 6 and Nylon 6-6.svg, a language-independent version of the German image. Preimage (talk) 08:35, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

I found this sentence confusing, and I imagine others have as well, but I also don't know enough about the topic of nylon to do a specific edit, so I'm going to point out the sentence and suggest two possible word changes to clarify its meaning.

"However, it also required a complex manufacturing process that would become the basis of industrial production in the future."

If this sentence is trying to convey that the complex manufacturing process didn't see wide use in the future, I suggest the wording be changed to:

"However, it also required a complex manufacturing process that would not become the basis of industrial production in the future."

On the other hand, if the sentence is trying to convey that the manufacturing process would become more standard in the future, but was too complex for mid-1930s technology, then I suggest the wording be changed to:

"However, it also required a complex manufacturing process that would not become the basis of industrial production until the future."

(for the second suggestion: ideally include an article link to what that complex manufacturing process is; I presume from context in that subsection that the "complex manufacturing process" is a form of "cold drawing", but even if so it's unclear within this subsection if "cold drawing" as a concept was unreasonably complex for 1935, or if Carothers had used a version of "cold drawing" that would have been difficult to scale at the time... but it's also possible that a completely different manufacturing process is being referenced) ElsaSnowRainbow (talk) 14:29, 22 August 2025 (UTC)